learning experience

So, this past week my character design class assignment was to redesign the cast of the 1998 animated film, Quest for Camelot. It's more well-known for its songs, (David Foster!) actually, because the animation.......is not good.
My class was divided into groups of 4, and we had to redo 8 of the characters.
Actually I was freaking out when I heard the assignment, because I am not so comfortable with drawing people, and I knew that our end-product would have to be super good...luckily there were a couple people in my group who had no people-problems whatsoever, and I ended up drawing the 2 characters that exist but for a few minutes put together in the whole film.
Another freak-out issue was that the two characters assigned to me were....older males.
I can't draw men very well, and it took me a very long time to brush off the worry, haha.
This is King Arthur, sketch version. You can tell I was being super cautious, because I didn't want to mess up LOL. But my group told me that he was too boring, and I wholeheartedly agreed, so I tried to change his look.

This is King Arthur as he appeared on our presentation board. Better, right? I think he's still boring, but I'm really proud that he looks like a believable character....and a kingly one. haha. At the very least, he's more recognizable as a king than the film version. The film version.....he looks like a wimpy knight haha.


The next character I had to do was Sir Lionel, the main female protagonist's father. He exists for 2 minutes of the film, just enough screen time to show that he was super fatherly, and that he was so amazing that he sacrificed his life for the king. Then it's exit Sir Lionel. He also went through a few transformations because I was not able to draw a broad-chested male, but then I thought more simply and tried just drawing the basic body shapes first.

I think he turned out ok, too.
Working in a group was a lot harder than I thought, especially since we were only given a week to finish the task, and a few of us got only a few hours of sleep trying to finish up. One person didn't sleep at all :(

I think it was hard to coordinate an agreement between the group members on the look of the characters, especially since we HAD to redesign these specific characters, and we were at different drawing levels. But we really did our best, and I certainly did my best. I wish I could have contributed more, but I never really had a definitive style, so I think I just tried to keep up, haha.

Everything always seems to come down to confidence, doesn't it? Hm.

Recently I saw the work of Carter Goodrich, and I started trying to draw people following his approach to character design. form, form, form.
Type his name in Google and go to his website. His work is beautiful.

One problem I have with drawing people is that I tend to look at them in parts, so that's how my drawing turns out...and the parts don't look like they fit well together.
But I saw Carter Goodrich's stuff, and things made more sense.